Acquia Funds Community Development to Accelerate Drupal 8 Momentum

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Mar 16, 2016) - Acquia, the digital experience company, today announced that it is providing $500,000 to fund community development on Drupal 8. Acquia has established the Drupal 8 Module Acceleration Program to speed the delivery of key Drupal 8 modules. Acquia is funding module maintainers and experts in the Drupal community to port in-demand modules for creating powerful, next-generation digital experiences.

Members of the Drupal community build and maintain the modules that extend core Drupal functionality. Drupal 8's adoption since its November launch is twice that of the very popular Drupal 7, demonstrating Drupal's increasing popularity, especially in the enterprise space. Supported by Acquia, the Module Acceleration Program serves to coordinate and fund initiatives that accelerate development across the Drupal 8 ecosystem and extend the industry's most widely used enterprise digital experience management solution.

In a world that requires cross-platform publishing, developers and content teams don't want to be constrained in how content is presented across channels. They demand flexibility for how digital experiences are delivered. Drupal 8 does that with its improved content modeling and built-in REST APIs. Its "API-first" approach and modular framework means developers can create powerful, intuitive authoring experiences and empower editorial teams to work quickly for amazing results.

"Community-contributed modules fuel innovation in digital experience delivery. We're working with customers to identify priority modules for acceleration, and we're coordinating the efforts of many community contributors around the world," said Chris Stone, Acquia chief products officer. "The modules being funded have an immediate impact on current Drupal 8 projects at global organizations."

More than 30 modules have been completed to date with support of the Module Acceleration Program, with another 20 modules targeted for development in the next 60 days. Participants in the program include module maintainers and contributors, freelancers, and development agencies with Drupal practices.

"Community contributions are the heart of every open source project, and Drupal is fortunate to have a community that has more than 35,000 active contributors, led by many of the world's most well known brands," said Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and founder and project lead of Drupal. "Together the community delivered our most significant release with Drupal 8, building the framework for organizations to deliver contextual, multilingual, and multi-channel digital experiences."

"I remember months after Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 were released, we still couldn't recommend them to Lullabot's clients because contrib simply wasn't ready. With Drupal 8, Acquia is confronting this issue proactively and head on with its Module Acceleration Program, helping contrib catch up faster than ever before," said Lullabot Chief Operating Officer Seth Brown.

"Acquia funded the development of the Scheduled Update module for Drupal 8," said Ted Bowman of Six Mile Tech. "The company's support has helped build a module that will be a powerful publishing tool for all kinds of applications."

Updates on module progress may be found on the Acquia Developer Center, or follow the project's progress on Twitter by following #d8map.

Visit www.acquia.com/d8-module-acceleration-program to find out more about the Module Acceleration Program.

About Drupal
Drupal is the open source, digital experience framework behind millions of websites and applications. It powers many of the web's most influential platforms. Introducing hundreds of new breakthrough capabilities, Drupal 8 makes digital experiences extraordinary across all channels of customer interaction to deliver transformative business results.

Drupal has one of the largest open source communities in the world. It's a global community of designers, writers, translators, developers, sponsors, and more. In addition to enhancing Drupal's core, they work together to extend Drupal with contributed modules, themes, and distributions.

About Acquia
Acquia is the digital experience company. Intuit, Warner Music Group and Stanford University are among the more than 4,000 organizations that are transforming their digital businesses with Acquia's open cloud platform. Global 2000 enterprises, government agencies and NGOs rely on Acquia to create new revenue streams, lower costs, and engage audiences more deeply through content, community, commerce and context.

For more information visit www.acquia.com or call +1 781 238 8600.

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